Medical procedures are available for treatment of a variety of cardiovascular conditions, such as cardiac arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation, and other irregularities in the transmission of electrical impulses through the heart. As an alternative to open-heart surgery, many medical procedures are performed using minimally invasive surgical or transvenous intracardiac catheter techniques, where one or more slender implements are inserted through one or more small incisions into a patient's body. Such procedures may involve the use of catheters or probes having multiple sensors, electrodes, or other measurement and treatment components to treat the diseased area of the heart, vasculature, or other tissue. Minimally-invasive devices are desirable for various medical and surgical applications because they allow for shorter patient recovery times compared to surgery, and for precise treatment of localized discrete tissues that are otherwise difficult to access. For example, catheters may be easily inserted and navigated through the blood vessels and arteries, allowing less-invasive access to areas of the body with relatively little trauma, while other minimally-invasive probes or instruments may be inserted into small openings and directed through targeted anatomy without significant impact or disruption to surrounding tissue.
One such example of a minimally invasive therapy involves the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias or irregular heartbeats in which physicians employ specialized cardiac assessment and treatment devices, such as a mapping and/or ablation catheter, to gain access to interior regions of a patient's body. Such devices may include tip electrodes or other ablating elements to create lesions or other anatomical effects that disrupt or block electrical pathways through the targeted tissue. In the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, a specific area of cardiac tissue having aberrant electrical activity (e.g. focal trigger, slow conduction, excessively rapid repolarization, fractionated electrogram, etc.) is typically identified first before subsequent treatment.
MAP recording devices, ablation devices, and combination mapping and ablation devices may include many individual parts, which makes manufacturing difficult and expensive. For example, one device had a tip electrode design that included spherical balls welded or formed at the end of round Platinum rod stock. Early methods of manufacture used to produce these devices proved inconsistent and produced an electrode sphere that was not completely round. As a result, it was difficult to properly seat the electrodes in the dome component at the distal portion of the device. The electrodes also could become misaligned within the dome component when the electrode sphere was welded to a wire, because the wire was so easily attached to a point eccentric to the axis of the electrode. Further, such devices are expensive to manufacture, due in large part to the use of separate costly components. The use of multiple components further makes breakage during use more likely, which may result in injury to the patient.
To provide more effective and efficient methods of manufacturing mapping devices and methods of medical treatments, it is thus desirable to minimize the number of individual components used to manufacture a mapping and/or ablation device and to optimize the functionality of each component used.